Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Disappointment

I am profoundly disappointed with our North Carolina state government. Our state is figuratively strangling some of the most vulnerable people in NC, specifically indigent nursing home residents! The state has not increased the rate that Medicaid pays for nursing home care in four years, that's 4 years!!! Our great nurses and nursing assistants rightly demand a wage increase every year. If they don't get more money, they can go somewhere else. The people that work at LSC aren't asking for the moon, but just enough to get by. And the price of food and electricity and gas keeps rising for LSC just like it does in our own homes. In the language of the farmers I grew up with, we are eating our seed corn. Lutheran Services Carolinas' seed corn is low turnover, quality care, and quality of life, all the things that make LSC communities a great place to live. How do we sustain what we have built for 50 years when we haven't had an increase in four years? And it gets worse. On January 1, 2014, every indigent nursing home resident in the state will be hit with a 3% Medicaid rate cut! Now, the law says that by January 1, 2015 the state is to decide on a plan to give us some of that money back in some type of "quality" incentive, but no one has decided on what that criteria might look like and if we get all, part, or none of that money back. It appears the cart is way ahead of the horse. It seems like we should have created a plan, then implemented the plan. We have implemented a plan, now we have to decide what the plan is. This rate cut is evidence of a larger problem. Nursing home expenditures are not the state's problem. Nursing home expenditures are stable. But Medicaid is rapidly expanding to cover more and more people. Somebody has to pay for that. Isn't it a shame that the poorest, oldest citizens in our state are bearing that burden? That is the disappointment!

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